If you’re a creative, art or marketing director, you’ve likely experienced at least one (or all) of these scenarios when managing priorities for your creative services team:
A large corporate rebrand is looming, but your team is spending too much time managing current projects – they don’t have time to go back and rebrand your vast library of materials
Your team can’t dedicate enough time to creative work because they are “in the weeds” managing high-volume business cycles
You have an abundance of production-level design or templated work that doesn’t require the cost and expertise of a creative agency
Despite these challenges, the work still needs to be completed on time and meet brand standards. Knowing your creative services team is already swamped and needs to focus on doing what they do best – being creative – it may be time to consider using untapped resources to keep your creative workflow humming along.
One such resource? Your full-service print and digital communications provider.
Consider the advantages
Your full-service print and digital communications provider has onsite graphic designers and prepress technicians who are already intimately familiar with your brand. And if a rebrand is on the horizon, now is the perfect time for your vendor’s team to familiarize themselves with your new standards.
Most print and digital communications vendors today already work with their clients’ agencies in various capacities, from executing marketing campaign elements like direct mail to managing ad distribution on media buys. Sending overflow creative work or templated, production-level design work that likely isn’t budgeted for agency rates is an increasingly attractive option, as it saves companies time and money.
Want to learn more about Ai’s creative services? Download our services sheet.
Why it works
Perhaps most importantly for your needs, outsourcing high-volume, templated creative services projects to your vendor frees up marketing and creative teams – and agency partners – the time and resources to focus on key objectives, such as marketing strategy, brand standards and metrics.
Due to the internal structure of many vendors, outsourcing this type of creative services work can be very cost-effective.
How it works
Once a template and process have been designed by your internal team, agency or vendor, the brand standards are in place and the burden is lifted from your shoulders. Our team works with clients with varying needs that require the same result – less strain on their creative teams. Two recent projects we collaborated on illustrate the ease with which you can leverage this approach.
One of our long-time clients was undertaking a massive rebrand that would result in a completely new look for its print and digital collateral, spanning multiple business lines in several languages. We collaborated with our client to rebrand more than 150 different services spec sheets and multi-page white papers. Each piece required new layouts, color schemes and copy that strictly followed newly established brand standards, a critical element to the project. As a result, the client was able to focus on higher level projects while delegating repeatable, templated work.
We also helped a client who was undertaking a reorganization of marketing and creative priorities. They needed a partner to handle the monthly updating of more than a dozen electronic sell sheets, email blasts with product guides, and other materials for hundreds of products. The goal? Free up their team’s time to focus on the global brand strategy versus diving into the repeatable, but time-consuming, production of these pieces.
This approach to creative services has saved these clients, and many others, significant time and money. More importantly, it has strengthened relationships and allowed for smooth transitions to new projects with updated creative and brand standards.
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